Sarny (2 page)

Ain’t that something?

The reading didn’t spread so fast at first.

Took on to be slow, like watching spilled molasses smearing across a table. Nightjohn he was gone but I got to where the letters meant more all the time and pretty soon I was working words with two and even three parts in them, writing whole sentences helping others and before too long some were doing the same.

Women at first, because they had the time and some kind of toughness so they could learn at night even after working in the day. Men a little slower. They worked until they dropped, busted and sore and didn’t have much left for learning, but they did just the same, only slower.

Came a day maybe a year after Nightjohn he was gone, came a day when it changed. One day it seemed people were having trouble with the words and some would stammer at them and make them slow and with thick
sounds and the next day it was different. Seemed everybody was reading and then it spread, oh my yes, it spread like a fire in dry grass.

One would help two and two would help four and nearly everybody came to know reading and writing and then it went to other plantations and they tried to stop it.

The men with whips and dogs they tried to stop it because they knew, they knew what it meant. Meant we were learning, coming to know how it was other places, other times.

Places and times where there weren’t slaves, where one didn’t own another, couldn’t own another by law. And then, some who read and some who didn’t, but just listened to the ones who read, some started to run. Run north.

Running was the same as reading. It started slow, like molasses at first. They’d run and get caught, get whipped, get cut, get hung sometimes, get killed sometimes.

But they kept running, trying it, because they knew from reading could they stay with it, follow the drinking gourd, the Big Dipper, and get north, get away, they could be free. Free to read what they wanted to read, know what they wanted to know, free to be more.

I would have run. As sure as I took a breath I would have run and there wasn’t a thing in the world that could have kept me from running
except being a woman caught me from the side.

One day I was a girl, doing girl things, and then another year had gone and another. Must have been three years since Nightjohn he left, and I wasn’t a girl anymore.

Was a woman.

With woman’s thoughts and woman’s doings. ’Course others noticed it. Waller he noticed it and wanted me to be with men but Nightjohn he took it out of Waller some way. Oh, Waller he was still mean, mean as snakes, and he used the whip and his hands in bad ways but there was something gone from the center of him, some of the hardness. Got to where it was easy to get around him and when he would tell me to do something with men I would nod and then talk to the men and we would just let on there was doings but there wasn’t. Wasn’t any doings at all.

But I was changed now and part of me was all turned around. Of an afternoon I was sitting shucking dry corn for the crib, a late summer afternoon and Martin he walked by and he filled my eyes like I was seeing him for the first time.

I knew him when I was a baby, saw him all along and didn’t notice him and now it was like an ox hit with the hammer.

Martin I thought—my, my, look at Martin.
Look at
all
of Martin. And I did, looked right at him and smiled with my chin down and my eyes open so shameless old Delie she saw it and called me a little hussy. Didn’t matter because Martin he looked right back at me and smiled and from then on we didn’t need words except I wouldn’t do women’s doings until we married.

So we put our heads in the big kettle to make it right and married with a Bible under our hands, a Bible I could read some of, most of, and we took a blanket together and he was my husband and I was his wife and so I couldn’t run.

We talked on it some. On the blanket after a month and two and three we talked at nights alone of running because others had run and some made it.

But before long I was going to mother and Delie she held the string and needle up and said it would be a boy, a strong boy, but that I’d have a hard birthing the first time.

First time, I thought. Like there was going to be more but I didn’t say anything. I was showing some and Waller he let me to slow down a bit because he had heard about the needle test and knew Delie was ’most always right and a boy would make a man and a man would make him money.

The house people found a piece of paper
wrapped around hard sugar once that was a bill of sale for selling a man slave. He fetched twelve hundred and fifty dollars at the auction—that’s more money than a free man made in four years working a good job. More money than a slave made in four lifetimes. That’s what Waller saw. He saw me showing and it meant money to him. Martin he talked more about running. But I couldn’t.

I would have lost the baby, did we run, and so we stayed, me because I had to and Martin because he was good to the core of him and wouldn’t leave me and it was a shame because it killed him, staying on to work. Waller he worked him to death in three more years. Martin he was some older than me and Waller started him to working heavy, lifting and pushing heavy things, trying to move cotton bales bigger than ten men, and it finally killed him. Something broke inside and he bled and died in one night.

But not at first. At first we got to have some living.

The baby came and Delie she was right. It was a hard birth but a strong boy and we named him Tyler because I saw the name on a bill of lading and thought it was pretty and sounded like a good name for a strong boy and Martin he agreed.

We talked of running again but it was hard
to run with a baby and by the time Tyler was old enough to understand being quiet and hiding at night I was with child again and so we couldn’t run.

Delie she said this time it would be a girl with an easy birth. Martin he only lived another year. Saw the baby come—we named her Delie—and then came a dark time, so dark even remembering it hurts.

Martin he died one day. Was a sunny day and I wanted it to be gray, raining, wanted the sky to cry because Martin died. I couldn’t stand it. Breath didn’t come, couldn’t see, even forgot the children. Just sat in a corner of the slave quarters and hated. Hated Waller, hated cotton, hated God for taking him, for making Waller, for making cotton, hated everything while Martin he died broke inside.

Delie she sat with me, held me, cried with me and patted me on the side of my head and wiped my cheeks.

“It will be all right,” she said. “Everything will be all right.”

“No,” I said. “It won’t. Nothing’s all right with Martin gone.”

And it wasn’t, not then, not ever.

Worse came then. I didn’t think there could be anything worse than Martin dying but worse came. Delie she died from being old. I was with her when it happened. We were
working on leather, softening mulehide to be made into harness traces, and Delie she said to me, “I believe I’d better sit a spell,” and she went over by the side of the quarters and sat and closed her eyes. I brought her water in the metal dipper and said her name.

“Delie?”

But she was gone, dead and gone just as quiet as going to sleep and we buried her in the slave ground up by the hill and I didn’t seem to be able to see over it. First Martin and then Delie. Was like a wall around me and hadn’t it been for little Delie and Tyler I think I would have passed from a broken heart. But it wasn’t over. The dark times.

Waller he took to drinking and gambling.

It started slow. Some of the house slaves saw it first, that he was playing cards in town and coming home late after we were asleep in the quarters and sitting with whiskey until he passed out. Time was Waller he had power over people, even other white people, and he grew on the power, fed on it, but all that left him now. Old woman said to me, “Man takes a drink, drink takes a drink, drink takes a man.” Didn’t take Waller long to go through it all. Everything in him that had power in it left him. He was still mean, but it didn’t work out of him like it did once and some of the slaves would point at him when he was drunk
and smile behind their hands. I would have felt bad for the white women in the house didn’t I hate them so. But in their own little ways they were as mean as he was and inside my heart I was glad Waller was falling apart. It was stupid because I didn’t see what this would mean for us. We belonged to Waller, just like mules or cotton. Just property. All of us, even little Delie and Tyler.

And soon enough Waller he couldn’t do anything but lose.

Time passed, and more time until both the babies were weaned and running in shirtwaists. Been others to see me, other men, but the memory of Martin was too sharp, cut like a knife, and I didn’t see the other men. Would I try to look at them I’d just see Martin, Martin’s smile, the way he moved, his strong hands, and I’d turn away.

It was then the year eighteen hundred and sixty-one. I was a full woman aged twenty and four with my two children growing up my legs, both starting to work, and we started in to hearing things.

Was a rumble up north, we heard, a rumble that there would be a war, and then there was a war. We found some newspapers and we could read now, most of us, read as fast as our eyes could move, and there were stories in the
paper about the war and how the North was going to come down and free the slaves.

Didn’t say it that way. Not then. Not in any paper in the South where they still used ugly words, bad words for people in the quarters. Didn’t say free the slaves. Said the war was to make the Southern states come into line with the North and that emancipation was a part of the fighting. But it was the same—meant to free us and we all prayed with our heads in the pot and I took my children and went to Delie’s grave and told her time and again, I said, “They’re coming down here, the Northern army is coming to set us free.”

And we waited.

And we waited some more and nothing much seemed to be happening. We got papers now and again, wrapped around packages from town, and once a whole newspaper that Billy he stole off a wagon when nobody was looking.

The paper talked of fine things for the South and how well it was going and how they were winning all the battles and it made us all feel sour and down but then I remembered that writing was just people talking on paper. Except for in the Bible, could a person lie when he talked, he could lie when he wrote. I sat in the quarters of a night with a candle
taken from the big house under a blanket with little Delie and Tyler holding the blanket off the flame and read the paper again. Read not what it said in words but what it said in thoughts.

Words were bad. Battles were going fine, it said, Confederacy winning wherever it fought, it said, big battle at a place called Gettysburg up in a North state named Pennsylvania. Said the Confederate states won a “resounding victory.” All that it said in words.

But there were more words than those. Words in the back, two solid pages of names of the Confederate dead who died at Gettysburg in the fighting. Small print, names on top of names on top of names, each one a dead soldier and I don’t know nothing of battles and how they fought wars but I knew you didn’t win battles by having all those names of dead men. That’s how you lost battles, and lost wars, and I felt good. Not for the dead names. Might I hate them, every one was still some mother’s child and I felt bad for the mothers. But Lord it was good to think the North was winning.

More words. Talked of how there wasn’t any more sugar, how people couldn’t ship cotton because of Northern ships closing harbors, how flour was getting on to being four and
five dollars a pound in the city. People winning wars don’t be paying five dollars a pound for flour—that comes from losing.

So I told the rest that it was nigh over and that could we just hang on, hang on, soon we would be free when the North won the war.

Except Waller he got more drunk and lost more and more playing cards in the town and one day he came out with another man.

Tall man, greasy face narrow like a hand ax. Had a transport wagon with rings bolted in the floor boards to old chains. For transporting people. For moving slaves.

But it came empty. Waller he wasn’t buying slaves.

He was selling. Found later he had lost and lost more at cards with no money left and all he had to sell was slaves.

Had us to sell.

We all knew it was coming and we all hid in the quarters or in the barns or in the bushes thinking couldn’t he see us he wouldn’t think to sell us, crazy thinking. He took Billy for the wagon and another man named Tuck who had been watching me and I had looked at a time or two. And then Waller he found me in the quarters and took little Delie and Tyler and bolted them in the wagon.

“No!” I screamed it and he turned from
the wagon and hit me once with the whip, not to mark just to get my attention but I didn’t care.

Couldn’t take my children.

Sweet things, my heart, part of Martin part of me things, sweet little darling things that were all my soul and breath and what I lived for, all my memories and all my thoughts were little Delie and Tyler and that low man he chained them into the wagon with the two men.

“They’ll fetch good,” he said to the man driving the wagon. “Those two pups. They’ll bring good …”

I ran to the wagon and said, things, wild things, said I would do anything for him only please don’t take my children, not my heart, not all of me, not that.

But he paid me no more mind than he’d pay a braying mule and when the wagon left I started to run after it but he grabbed me and dragged me back and put a shackle on my wrist and tied me to the same chains on the wall where they tied Delie to whip her.

I watched the wagon, pulled at the chains and watched the wagon until it went around some trees and I couldn’t see it, and then I listened to the squeak of the wheels and the rattle of the chain until I couldn’t hear it and then I listened to the memory of the wagon in
my mind, every sound, every sight of it until it was dark and somebody brought me some corn bread and a piece of pork fat.